


Radio Interference

by porrimsantorum



Series: Radio Interference [1]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artist Sole Survivor, Because here Nora isn't limited to Bethesda's shitty preconceived endings, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fix-It, Slow Burn, Synth!Sole Survivor, and we can be more creative then that., double survivor fun
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2018-07-24 02:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 14,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7490487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/porrimsantorum/pseuds/porrimsantorum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They gape at each other as the seconds pass, both minds puzzling over how the other ended up there, radio in hand. He wonders how she lugged a hunk of metal half her size across the city. She wonders how he cradled the tiny pink frame without it shattering to pieces in the madness. They both wonder, out of all their belongings, why this was the only object they’d brought out of the burning world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shit

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to say, this is like the first fic i’ve written since middle school, (no one needs to see those though.) and I’m trash so here’s this.  
> I’m using some creative license here with the culture, I’m going to base it on 1950s America with some minor alterations. Let me be clear: even though the beginning of game took place in 2077, the culture is still akin to the 1950s. The overall aesthetic will be similar, you know, milkshakes at a diner and all that jazz, but this also means I’m not going to remove the negative things about American culture during that time period either. But we'll get to that later. Someday.

 

The radio had been flickering on and off for several weeks now. It began with the faint buzz of dark static, cluttering the sounds of the strange discordant jazz broadcast from some obscure little station that could only exist in a city like Boston. The building was small and cozy, as cozy as a cube of lived in concrete and steel can be. In one corner fit a radiator, the only thing keeping the unusually cold October morning at bay. The petite figure occupying the space sat slouched over on a couch made from a brown corduroy-like fabric, a gift received from a friend during their years at art school. 

 

Her posture was decidedly unladylike, laying back into the fluff of the couch cushions, arms crossed, thighs splayed out wide without stockings, a pink dress with an unacknowledged yellow paint stain hiked so far up her thigh that in public it would have caused quite a stir. Nevertheless, she sat, scowling with eyes pointed straight ahead at the mess of oil painting in front of her that she seemed to be stuck on. She had held position for an unknown amount of time, enough for the ridges in her shoulders to begin to cramp up and her eyes to start blurring behind her circular glasses. The discomfort forces her to blink away the fog, and she begins to think again after hours of disconnection. 

 

She remembers having a fit of inspiration after dinner, then it was all lines and shapes and colors and marvelous, furious, focus, tunnel vision that would blow even the most hardened politicians out of the water. Now, Stirring from her sleep deprived stupor, she begins to come back to herself, listening the breaks in the radio, silence then static discord, wiggling her fingers, then reaching back and digging a hand into the flesh of her trapezius in an attempt to push out some of the horrible stiffness.

 

Sitting up, she checks the window looking out over the expanse of darkened steel, glimmering with the occasional 24 hour diner, contrasting with the midtones of light beginning to grow in the sky, rolling in from the east. 

 

Sunrise, she notes first.

 

The lovely blue glows against her,

 

Shit, she notes second.

 

She closes her eyes, putting her face in her hands, effectively blocking the steady light.

 

She hadn’t even noticed the sun go down, huffing a frustrated grumble at own carelessness, she rakes her hands up her head into her hair. Curling her fists into it she gives it a short tug in some sort of mock punishment, feeling the skin on her scalp raise then fall again. The motion itself isn’t even relatively uncomfortable, but the oils she drags away with her hands leave her feeling the need to shower.

 

So she does. She enjoys the warm water in all it’s pure luxury. Taking extra time to scrub the dead skin from her legs and shoulders. She thinks about the time she spent in California, how the water was rationed, how the showers were timed, shorter and shorter with each passing year. Ten minutes to five. Five minutes to two. Before leaving for good she’d needed to put shampoo in her hair before she’d even touched the shower dial. Now though, she cuts off the warmth of the water only after turning the room into a sauna, steam bellowing out from the door as she exits to her bedroom, muscles loose from the heat, but otherwise satisfied, like the world had finally returned what it had owed her. 

 

 

 

It had been a long, winding road to get here, as life usually was. She’d barely made it through high school, the only redeeming quality in her college applications showed up in mediocre test scores and a marvelous portfolio. After graduation she ran up and down the west coast, doing portrait commissions and taking up in small galleries. She’d become a rising sensation before a call came in from the opposite side of the country, a man offering acceptance into a swanky exhibition in the heart of a major east coast city. 

 

The official show was opening in a few days, her paintings had already been installed and waited on some final minor detail hashing out from the curator. Her life was about to begin.

 

But first, she had to eat breakfast.

 

 

 

after she re-dressed and stowed all her paint things away in their proper metal toolbox, she grabbed a bowl of cereal for herself. She made her way to the kitchen table with her food in one hand and a sketchbook in the other with the intent to take the radio apart to find the source of the jarring stop starting sound quality. Along the way, she figured, maybe do a few studies of the inside if the little machine. She’d always found little contraptions like this astounding, but she’d never had gone anywhere with it other then a quick side project for a class a few years back.

 

Turning the radio to the news, she takes a bite of her cereal. She figures that the cause might be one of the wires, as she unscrews the back panel. If that was the case, it would be easier to hear the distortion in the news anchor’s clear toned voice rather then trying to listen for the flaw while a couple of saxophones went at it. 

 

She paused briefly to giggle at the crude mental image, imagining the ugly clanking of the instruments as they smashed together in mock intercourse. Sexyphones. Gettin’ funky with it. Gettin’ down.

 

Her grandmother would be ashamed of her. 

She didn’t care. 

 

The host went on and on, about the conflict, about the brave soldiers. She’d never particularly liked propaganda, but she had to admit she didn’t mind the booming demand for pin-up poster artwork that came with wars like these. It was a good way to make cash on the side, and not nearly as risky to distribute as an eight-pager. 

 

The radio creeks as she digs her fingers into the panel, and with a few short wiggling movements, it’s off. 

 

 

She thinks about her new neighbor, an engineer she met yesterday afternoon, who’d brought her a slice of the most organized welcome lasagna she’d ever had the pleasure of consuming. They made small talk about the day, finding out they had the same last name, a common one in these parts. He told her about his long struggle in avoiding a guy from Vault-Tech involving some creative evasive maneuvering, culminating in him resignedly signing some papers to get the man off his back. She asked if there was a vault nearby, he'd told her about vault 90, joking about it being a brisk jog away. When the conversation began to dwindle, she thanked him, taking the slice of lukewarm lasagna and heading to the kitchen to grab a fork. 

 

 

She knicks an exposed wire with her fingertip and immediately withdraws from the shock that runs up her arm. Something that she hit jostles around inside the metal frame and makes the radio blares static, then clears away completely. Silence under the faint buzz of the electricity, silence from the open window of her apartment, an uncomfortable disquiet. She screws the back panel in, thinking she might have broken it even further before she hears the news anchor draw a long, shuttering, breath. 

 

“There are incoming reports of… oh my god…” This wasn’t the anchor’s usual radio voice, it shook, muddled with grief.

 

Her legs move on their own accord, pushing out of their seat, but staying planted on the tile of the kitchen floor. She grabs the radio, turning it up. 

 

“Nuclear detonations in New York City, Pennsylvania…” The anchor breaks his facade completely, shuffling in the background of the station signaling movement, flight. “I- I need to leave! My family, they’re still…”

 

The white bowl with little yellow flowers still sits on the table, half of the cereal eaten, spoon perched on the edge. The seeds of panic begin to sound in from the open window as the vacuum of silence collapses through the city. The sun has barred itself across the blue sky now, streaming through the glass, glinting over the silver of the spoon. The girl and the radio are gone. The door to her apartment has been left open.

 

The vault sits hidden between two large skyscrapers across the street from the college campus. The woman in a pink dress bolts down the road, weaving in between traffic as bodies begin to stream out of buildings in erratically moving droves. There is a crowd gathered near the vault’s entrance now, sirens wailing in the distance drilling their impending doom across the mass in waves. Guards in riot gear are shoving back at the newcomers, one raises his baton in a fake swing causing the mob to fall back, then returning like the tide to crush up against the guard’s shield.

She acts on instinct, using her short stature and the hard edges of her radio to prod a tunnel through the crowd without a sparing thought. As she catches a glimpse of the elevator's concrete base, a desperation fills her throat, she needs to be there. Two men stand at the entryway on the other side of the barbed wire fence, one with a clipboard and the other in a blue vault suit with a yellow 90 emblazoned across the back. That’s the target. They both look very official, important-like.

She wants to live. The gravel under her feet shifts as she walks forward, determined.

She’s going to lie to both of them.

“Stop!” The man’s voice is hoarse from exhaustion, eyes flashing, she notices the red under his glasses. He looks her up and down with distaste, then back at the clipboard. His mouth opens but she interrupts before his tongue can shape its next word.

“My name’s on the list!” She shouts back at him in mock indignation. “My last name is Grey, see? It’s right there.”

It wasn’t lying necessarily, deceptive maybe, but not a lie. Her last name was Grey, but so was her neighbor’s, and was on the list. She figures that a guy who had flown out to Florida yesterday evening didn’t necessarily need this spot. He should have landed a few hours ago if her internal clock was correct.

The man with the clipboard scowls, eyebrows pointing downward. Grey’s heart leaps into her throat, she's failed, she’s failed, he wasn’t going to allow her entry. Her heart speeds faster, ears ringing over the sirens. She doesn't want to die. Life had always been good to her.

 

“Mam, I’m sorry but-”

“Oh! Doctor Grey!” The man with the clipboard is cut off again, this time by the man in the vault suit as he addresses her. Confusion hits, she wasn’t a doctor, but all her wandering thoughts are banished when he steps forward and smiles, winking an eye at her. He mouths for her to play along. She wasn’t going to let the opportunity slide. Readjusting her posture, she puts up an impatient teacher front, pursing her lips a tad.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you,” He turns back toward clipboard man with a frown, “Good god, let the doctor in at once!”

The gates open slowly, the sound metal scraping against itself rising in pitch. Guards clamor to stop the influx of people rushing towards the opening doors.

Grey slips through, pink dress fluttering slightly behind her.

Cries resound when the metal shuts. She can’t hear them. There is safety on this side of the gate.

The man in the vault suit shambles over to her, taking her arm with his, walking them to the elevator.

“Your name is Doctor Alex Grey, you have a PHD in engineering from the Commonwealth Institute of Technology. If anyone else asks you any more then that request to see the overseer.” He speaks in a hushed tone, leading her softly to the platform.

"The overseer?" Grey asks.

"Me."

When they reach the platform there is a large group of people on the elevator already, waiting for someone to give an order.

The man in the vault suit, the overseer, barks some sort of command when they reach the center of the platform. Gears begin to whirr and creek as the concrete lowers slowly into the ground. A child cries somewhere past the fence line. It didn’t matter. Her fingers dig further into the fabric of the overseer’s suit, he offers a hand, setting it on her back.

Grey can see the red bloom of the device over the skyscrapers before she can hear it. It reflects in all the eyes of every person standing there together, they created this, death destroyer of worlds. The platform ducks underground just before the boom of the detonation shatters through her lungs. Before a second wave of noise and fury reaches them, the ceiling closes overhead. Clamping it's steel jaws like a judge's gavel.

In the darkness of the descent to the bottom, the overseer pulls Grey in for a long embrace, and they tremble together. The radio under her left arm pokes uncomfortably into the overseer's side, but he holds on anyway.


	2. Isaac Newton Was an Asshole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Existential crisis time with a small side of super nerds taking a stress nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also i haven't edited this yet but i just wanna get it up before i have another excuse to delay.

The Overseer releases Grey from his impromptu embrace before the lights blaze in through the silver mesh and elevator clanks down to the bottom. Leaning in, he gives her instructions in a hushed voice, just loud enough to hear over the mechanism of the opening door.

“Follow the crowd sweetheart. I’ll come find you after everything has settled, excuse me.”

He exits ahead of her, sliding through the crowd with a practiced ease, taking to the head of the group. He leads, walking up the metal grate stairs toward vault-tech staff in lab coats. 

She doesn’t think much about his behavior. Doesn’t think much at all about anything in detail, opts for observing instead.

Grey monitors the Overseer as she shuffles through the line. The staff funnels them through. He stands to the far left and watches the process casually, mentally cataloging each of his charges by name as they pass through to the entrance of the long hallway. 

Far ahead of her in line, a man dressed in a gray business suit attempts to shuffle around security towards the overseer. The burly guards stop him briefly, trying to coerce the nervous man back into line before the overseer makes eye contact with him. There is a moment of recognition before he splits into a grin. The overseer barks a cheery command to let him pass, and there is a flash of grey movement as the man makes a beeline scuttle over. 

She observes their interaction, attracted by the odd gait of the gray suited man, drawing her attention away from the long line ahead. The man and the overseer continue to speak for a long time after she’s shuffled through the doorway into quarantine.

————

The first room Grey walks into is a sterile white color, wiped clean from any signs of life, just cool enough to be uncomfortable as the panic induced sweat cools on her skin. Adrenaline dissipating with every heavy thump of her heart, gives way to the disillusions of the present, a crushing fog of unknown, of mountains of something too grand to look past. Something to do with the way the vault sealed, the way the clamoring, screaming masses writhed together in a knot, something to do with the way she’s trying to ignore red gore on her shoes, not thinking of the slick organic mash of red paste she almost slipped on. How it still felt warm underfoot. 

She’s still holding her radio, out of all the things. Both hands bear the marks of hurry, bruises of soon to be varied color, white knuckled around the square frame. She juggles it around, trying to wipe her hands off on her dress.

Somewhere in the background, a light voice rings out overhead from some sort of speaker system. 

“Please take a seat in the rows in front of you, In a few moments we will begin to call you one by one through the double doors ahead where you will be medically evaluated and receive your vault suit. Further instruction will be given to you by the attendant in the next room.”

She is pulled out of her daze for a few seconds just long enough to note the chairs, and slump into one, legs out, slouching low into its frame. Her regard for all others in the room temporarily forgotten as she continues to stare, radio secure in her lap. She doesn’t look to closely at her shoes.

————

Twenty minutes later, movement stirs on her left as the man in the charcoal colored suit takes the seat next to Grey, the guy that spoke with the overseer. He’s a good foot and a half taller then her standing, but feels terribly small when he huddles in his seat. His whole body seems to tremble as Grey’s eyes dart over his white dress shirt flecked with blood pouring from his nose as he settles in, taking off the jacket portion of his outfit and holding one of his dress sleeves up to his face in a feeble attempt to contain the fluid.

She leans a little in her chair to peer over at his other arm, and notices his hand, white knuckled, clutching a radio. It’s the newer model, smaller, lighter, with a matte pink coating of paint, making Grey’s sharp cornered stainless steel radio look more like an object that one would use to club baby seals with. She’s left staring at the object when he finally notices her presence, his eyes darting to the side, trying to identify who she is without looking at her directly. 

His strategy works for exactly thirty seconds before his eyes catch the fluorescent lights reflecting off the radio in her lap. He jerks his head over in a double take, furrowing his eyebrows in confusion. She returns the look, wide eyed. 

They gape at each other as the seconds pass, each mind puzzling over how the other ended up there, radio in hand. He wonders how she lugged a hunk of metal half her size across the city. She wonders how he cradled it’s tiny pink frame without shattering the thing to pieces in the madness. They both wonder, out of all their belongings, why this was the only object they’d brought out of the burning world.

This was a moment too significant for her to ignore. 

She scrambles to come up with some sort of icebreaker, and her list of pre-conceived ones seem lacking in the face of this calamity. A half second of deliberation later, she decides to draw from experience, unpacking the knowledge from all her years in art school. The only subjects she manages to connect together is that the pink of her dress matches the pink of his radio, and the steel of his suit matches her radio. With that half baked idea, she launches into conversation.

“We match!”

And somehow, the first interaction they both have with another human being after the end of the world, the first moment they share out of the chaos of millions of lives silenced and being silenced above them, begins with a giggle. 

Kind of.

The noise that comes from his throat is more of a soft wheeze at first, rising in volume into a feather light chuckle. As the man’s mouth turns upwards he crinkles his nose, delightful.

Until the motion sends another fresh stream of red blood down his face.

His hands fly immediately back to cover his nose, smile gone, trying to stem the flow with the sleeve of his jacket. 

“Honestly it’s not as bad as it looks-” He starts. Then watches in confusion as she reaches for the bottom of her pink dress and tears off a strip.

“Here.” She says.

Before he can protest anymore, her hand is under his nose, mopping up some of the blood with the fragment of her torn dress. He flounders, trying to make light of the situation.

“I’m afraid we don’t match as much anymore, with all the red on me. Sorry.”

She takes a hard look at him and contorts her face into a cheshire like grin, eyes remaining empathetic.

“That’s nothing a little improvisation can’t fix, nosebleed. Here, take the, ah, pseudo-tissue? We’ll just call it that for now. It’s nicer then calling it a rag anyway.” 

After handing him the ‘pseudo-tissue,’ she takes her now bloodied hands and smears them over the steel top of her radio, trailing the dull color over the metallic shine. Holding up her handiwork next to him, she admires the well placed swipes of drying blood mimicking the stains on his coat, ignoring the grossness of the action.

“Fixed it.”

“Indeed you did.” He replies, voice barely a whisper.

————

They don’t know each other. Neither had come across the other until this moment in the end of times. Neither of them would have crossed had the bombs not fell. They are each representatives of experiences that they will carry through time; longer then most living beings will, both coincidental victims of the same great misfortune.

But in the meanwhile, nosebleed tears the scrap of pink dress in half, rolls them up, and shoves both pieces up his nose.

————

The bleeding stops slowly, and a little pink returns to his face. Grey sits and continues to feebly jabber away the pervasive shock of lurid green behind her eyelids when she blinks. She takes in the visual of his blood as it decays into a muddy brown, and talks about the color red, then apples, then rails on Isaac Newton for a solid thirty minutes. He drinks in her distractive muttering over Newton’s shoddy calculus notation and joins her in songs of praise over the many miracles of Leibniz’s organized formatting. From that they move on to string theory. 

He seems to chatter just as much as she does on the topic of parallel universes, but sometime in the midst of the conversation his head slumps over onto Grey’s shoulder. She's surprised at the contact, right before he lets out a small snore. 

‘Bout as good time as any.’ Grey thinks, as she leans her head against the man’s and follows suit, eyes closing as she drifts into oblivion.

————

The intercom’s voice rings out again, hours later.

“Processing is taking longer then was initially estimated, we thank you for your patience. It should only take a few more hours to have everyone documented and sent through!”

The room rises steadily in volume after that, people begin to congregate in groups and engage in their own conversations. Anytime someone is called through a quiet cheer of relief runs through the room at the knowledge that some progress is being made.

Grey and the man in the charcoal suit wake up another hour later.

There are roughly half of the people left waiting to be called through. 

————

“You arrived a bit late to the party, in here I mean, I saw you talking to the guy in charge before they sealed up this tin can.” Grey asks.

“Ah, I was actually consulting with him earlier, before- Earlier this morning b-before,” His voice hitches on the words and he turns away, every second of comfort gained during their conversation sloughs off his posture, leaving him short of breath and rigor mortis ridged. He wipes eyes briefly before he continues with a faint wobble still in his voice. She doesn’t need to press.

“I’ve been talking about the construction of this vault with him over the past year. He was a professor at my college before he left for vault-tec as head engineer for vault 90. This is one of the smallest vaults, see, there wasn’t a lot of room in a city like this for any more space to build, so we decided to compartmentalize the building process into two wings.”

His eyebrows furrowed as he continued.

“E-even though the separation in this building was for the construction time’s sake, he’s also using it to divvy up jobs, energy and overall maintenance in one wing, then everything else, food, water, in the other. Each section has it’s own living quarters so there wouldn't be much interaction between the two groups.” 

“Why as little interaction as possible?”

“His idea. He thinks it’ll make the groups more productive if each section specializes.”

————

“I think brown would look good on you.”

“I- I like silver.”

“Oh! I didn’t mean to imply that you don’t look good in that suit, I just think you’d look good in a earthy brown as well.

————

The voice on the intercom spouts another name into the room, the tinny quality of the audio cheapens the pristine room.

“That’s my name.” The man in the charcoal suit says. Almost in disbelief.

“Oh.” Grey says smartly.

“I-I’ll see you in there?” He asks hesitantly, like he’s never gonna see her again. 

“Of course man. And hey, do me a favor?” 

“Hm?”

“Take care of yourself, nosebleed.”

The man, nosebleed, giggles with mirth sparkling in his eyes, and turning around, he walks toward the white doors with a little more confidence in his step. Only after he left did she register how blue his eyes actually were. 

This is the last interaction either will have as human beings. 

————

Hours passed since nosebleed was called through. The room continues to nurse a quiet buzz of conversation from its occupants. On the left side of the room, one man had somehow managed to deconstruct the backs from a few chairs and created a working table. Another member produced a deck of cards. Instead of playing poker, they began to stack the cards across the level surface, creating an intricate looking base for a card castle.

Engineers.

————

The group playing with cards shuffle out one by one, there are ten people left in the waiting room. 

She jiggles her leg in the char. 

Her fingers twitch.

Why hadn’t she saved her sketch book? Out of all the damn things to leave at home today. She looks at her radio, the now dried blood smeared over the flat steel panes. Maybe?

She digs a stray pen out of her pocket, long since drained of ink, and uses the tip of the pen to begin scratching patterns into the dried blood.

Someone’s name is called.

There are nine people left in the waiting room.

————

The patterns spread in a growth of chrome spirals across the brown of the dried blood, some of it flakes off on to her hands. She tries to wipe them off on her dress, which turns out to be little more then a minor improvement.

Blood, god, it had to be blood.

There are eight people in the waiting room.

————

Realization strikes her that she had probably been the last one in the entirety of Boston to make it to safety. If the city hadn’t been wiped off the map from a bomb, surely the leftover radiation in the atmosphere would kill the leftover population. 

There are five people in the waiting room.

She knows that Boston is only one of the thousands of glistening cities of the world. 

————

A single body remains in the waiting room.

She stares up at the ceiling and for the first time feels completely, utterly alone.

————

They call her name finally after what seems like a thousand years, breaking her from the trance. She swears she can feel her bones creak as she gets up from the plastic chair. Still cradling the radio in her arms. Blinking away the dryness in her eyes, she heads for the doors.

————

She wakes up on a hard metal table in a cold sweat and a high pitched tone in her ears. Her right arm and leg feel like death. She doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t know where her clothes are, doesn’t know where the vault suit they gave her went. For the first time in her life she doesn’t stop to ask any questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A tiny itty bitty cliff hanger. Also this is where things get weird. You're in for a huge time jump next chapter, along with some confusing plot development things.


	3. Green

The foggy air that hits her lungs feels like a cold ice bath rolling into her throat. Unlike the climate controlled seventy-two degrees fahrenheit of the vault, This air didn’t stand still, it dances around her in sweeping pushes and chills the tips of her fingers, sending her looking for shelter. Vaguely, she recalls a swatch of apartments down the road a ways, and begins a brisk jog.

The fog did a good job at obscuring detail, but Grey could still see vague silhouettes of the city around her. Most of the buildings here remained standing, some of the less blast-resistant ones had chunks blown out the sides or tops of their frames. The skeletons of car frames spaced across the road in jumbles, what looked like a flipped semi lays strewn out ahead. Nothing but her and the fog seemed to be moving here. Still, her footfalls remain silent as she cuts through.

The place ends up being closer then Grey had anticipated. Strangely, it’s boarded up tight, but she breaks into the complex with a little help from some loose rebar poking out of the roadside. Relief washes through her as she steps into the dryness of the building, keeping the rebar on her swinging arm.

The stairs leading up are blessedly made from concrete and metal. Nothing terrifying to scale. She takes them up to the first floor of apartments. The building isn’t in any bad condition Grey decides as she tries to jimmy open the first two doors, if the locks still worked like this. She stops for a moment to decide if she just wants to use force, before she notices a slight heaviness in the air. Fog reached in through a wide open door near the end of the hallway. Grey crouches, rebar secure in both hands, and moves forward glancing slowly into the doorway.

There’s a low howl as the darkening wind blows through the open mouths of the other skyscrapers. It resounds through the haze of the room through an open window. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to what she was seeing.

Near the window facing the other buildings lay two deathly still bodies. Grey’s heart stops in her approach, realization dawning, morphing her cautious frown into an expression pure terror.

The figure that sits closest to the glass holds a long barreled rifle. Evidence of a struggle shown in it’s posture as it hunched over a knife stuck into the fabric between it’s ribs. It’s skull twisted at an odd angle, cracked dome reflecting alabaster in the moonlight, lower jaw sitting on the ground next to it.

The second figure lies on it’s stomach on the ground a few feet away. This one covered head to toe with multiple types of fabric, seemingly scrounged together to assemble this monstrosity of an outfit.

Then again, Grey thought, looking down at herself and grimacing. At the stolen lab coat wrapped around her naked body and the stolen pip boy on her left arm. At the alarming scars bisecting her limbs. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a terrible idea to stockpile some sort of clothing that would actually cover her. she could conduct a thorough evaluation of her new physique later, or never. 

Grey approached the hooded body, sniffing the air around it. It didn’t seem to smell like anything, so that was a good sign. Maybe she’d gotten lucky, she thought, reaching for the hood, maybe the flesh magically just evaporated. You know, as flesh tends to do.

  There’s still a little bit of heft to the body as she sits it up against the closest wall. She considers, for a brief moment, that someone maybe is alive in this suit and they had just voluntarily decided to fall asleep here in the room with the skeleton. Instead Grey pulls off the hood and is met with a face of a very, very dead. Something. Humanoid. Not human though.

She recalls some of the images that came from game hunters working just out of bounds of Chernobyl’s irradiated zone. Fish with two heads, deer with none, wolves with leathery skin and teeth that poked right out of their forever snarling muzzles. This face bore that same pattern of irradiated nightmare. It’s skin was tough and thick, seemingly adhered to the skull. She strips the rest of the clothing, revealing sinewy muscle that clung sparsely to knobby bone. If he weren’t dead, and had the power of a god, she’d suspect Schiele’s hand in breathing life into this thing.

Grey dons the outfit, grabbing two leather strips from the skeleton’s leftover ensemble to secure the too-long pant legs around her ankles. She slips the ragged hood over her head, adjusting the oddly inbuilt goggles and tubes to secure it to her head. There’s a feeling of safety and separation with the hood on, and the goggles left her a good amount of peripheral vision. They didn’t block out any light really, but were completely opaque from the outside. She takes the rifle and scrounges some stray magazines out of the skeleton’s pocket. She looks over the room with her new round glass eyes, takes a deep breath through the tubes of the mask, and exits the room.

Later, she’ll take delight in the way the back of a pencil clinks against the glass of the goggles. Later she’ll run her hands along the lines of the entire hood’s construction and wonder who the being wearing it used to be. This mask will be more essential to her then any gun she will ever own, and make her very existence possible.

She never will fully recognize the slight gratitude she felt towards the dead feral.

But she does close the door on her way out.

————

Grey spends the rest of the day collecting supplies from the surrounding apartments, stockpiling them into a large backpack she’d found on the skeleton. The pickings are rather slim foodwise. There isn't much she’d consider to be still fit for consumption, and that which she does deem edible will surely be hard to hold down.

In one of the closets she pillages, she finds a bottle of antacid, on instinct she flips the bottle to look at the expiration date. The month and day had faded, but the year read 2082.

“Oh, shit.” She says into the empty apartment’s closet.

The words of her realization don't echo like the epiphany it feels like, and the glass from the lightbulb above her remains in many pieces under her ‘new’ boots.

Was it even the same year it had been when she’d left? How long was she trapped in that vault? Her perception of time had always been skewed, but the city looked like it had aged at least a few centuries. Although maybe a nuclear missile or two will do that.

Ideas of ‘when’ spawn inklings of ‘what’ and ‘how.’ The relative monotony of her scavenging proves itself to be fertile ground for these budding ideas that she nurses quickly into a sprawling garden of questions she doesn’t know the answers to. Offhandedly, she hopes that maybe this theoretical garden will grow her something useful, like a lighter. It does no such thing.

In the evening Grey struggles, and eventually manages to light a small fire next to one of the broken windows overlooking what remains of Boston. She opens a scavenged package of salisbury steak and burns it into a dark slab using a dead stranger’s skillet.

After she finishes cooking the monstrosity, she closes her eyes, holds her breath, and thinks of her neighbor’s perfectly layered lasagna.

Before she goes to sleep she pops one of the antacid tablets, just for good measure.

From her perch on the highest floor of the apartment complex, she watches the fog clear away in the final moments of the sunset. She gets her first true glimpse of the city since the bombs fell for a minute before the darkness starts morphing shapes into unrecognizable blisters of shadow.

Her last conscious thought, as she stares with eyes half lidded into the hazy green pall emanating from the southwest, is ‘why?’

 

She watches out the window for three days. Learns about the new reality of the world. Observes anemic bodies shamble through the streets in packs, like the dead one she had taken her hood from. Listens to the shattering of gunfire in the distance, further into the bowels of the ruin. On the second night, Grey watches clouds roll in from the glowing abscess to the southwest and light the entire city in pus green fury of what she assumed was leftover radiation from the bombs. If the way the geiger counter on her pip boy audibly rattled off ticks through the heavy canvas of her backpack was any indicator. It finishes punishing the rattling buildings in the witching hours of night, and Grey even manages to get an hour or two of sleep.

 

The next morning she’s awakened by gunshots.

Her fingers clutch over the rifle she has no idea how to use properly. There aren’t any bullets in the gun when she sets it up on the open ledge of the windowsill, using it to peer down at the road through it’s ridiculously long scope. There’s a group of corpse like beings beginning to stir from the sound of the gunshots echoing closer. Grey centers in and lines her sights up with its head. Watches it amble toward the source of the noise for a few seconds before it’s head bursts open with a crack.

Grey jumps back, almost dropping her rifle out the window in surprise, then rights herself. The hollow thunk of an aluminum bat resounds, then silence. By the time Grey recovers and looks back through her scope at the movement on the road below, there are six bodies laying in puddles of their own brains on the ground, two new figures in trench coats looming over them.

 

One of them is outfitted with an extraordinary arsenal of rifles hanging from their back, but they seemed to have a favorite weapon from the way they held the gore covered metal bat in their hands. Rifles goes to rummage around the bodies that still have clothing, thoroughly going through the pockets of the dead. Their partner stands off to the side to take a smoke break while Rifles picks the corpses clean of anything presumably valuable.

 

Grey watches, gargoyle-like from the top of the building. She says nothing, moves carefully away from the window so to not attract attention, and descends the staircase.

The pair round a corner, due east with the sun in their eyes, and Grey follows them into the morning light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boners features, a double upload on (almost) the same day. At least within a few hours of each other. 
> 
> UPDATE*** March 20th 2017 - added the last few paragraphs. Finally some canon characters (?)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On this episode of why am I writing this:
> 
> We learn about the basics of character design! *Points at Grey* Don't do that it's too confusing!!!  
> What happened in that vault? -We may never know!  
> With special guest: Hinted at but not appearing quite yet!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***AY alright so I added an extra tidbit onto the last chapter right at the end that didn't feel right going in this one, It's a tiny bit important but you'll get the general idea even if you don't read it. Sorry i'm so scattered guys orz
> 
> Here we get first hints at other characters that'll be appearing sometime soon, like next chapter soon. (I have like 24,000 words in my draft for this entire story rn and the slow-burn is SLOW rip u ppl)

 

Grey has been trailing them for a few days now. They’ve been making incremental progress towards the heart of the city, decimating the packs of hostile bodies wandering the streets. Leaving a vacuum, void of life or anything dangerous, in their wake.

 

 

Grey settles in for the evening, in time with her new protectors, and begins to take her hood and gloves off. Once everything is stashed away accordingly, she goes to find a bathroom.

 

They’re lined with unbroken mirrors, and she looks, against her better judgement.

 

Her eyes trace over the reflection, a rift apparent between her preconceived self and her new reality. Grey refuses to think about what happened in the vault, but allows herself to observe more in an attempt to stave off some of the morbid curiosity that haunts her every time she touches her face.

 

The head, her head, is partitioned by two planes of skin. Her face holds the same warm flush of color as it always had, but that’s where the recognizable features end. She has no hair; no peach fuzz or eyebrows. A line of cool gray frames the human flesh of her face, brand new skin extending to entrap the rest of her head, down to a seam encircling her neck just above the collarbone.

 

To say it bothers her is an understatement.

 

She rolls up the shirtsleeve on her right arm and glowers at it. The skin’s made from a thick but flexible plastic like material, running from the tips of her fingers to a bit further then above the elbow on her upper arm. The meeting point between the two materials is disconcerting. They're different temperatures, the synthetic skin a few degrees cooler than the flesh.

She has a strong impulse to try and tear the foreign limb off, sever it from her body. Her body. It isn't even really hers though, is it? She begins to claw at the plastic skin, digging her nails into the rubbery gray substance. There’s pain, but it’s not sharp and cutting like it should be, it’s dull, a vague warning of general discomfort. So she lets go.

 

She glances at the thing in the mirror one more time before exiting, raising both hands up and wiping them off on her shirt. She notices then that only one of them actually feels clammy, and the motion dragging down her shirt manages to get most of the sweat off. Her right hand though, the plastic one, rolls down the fabric smoothly.

 

Her hood and gloves go back on the instant they’re within reach.

 

 

 

The police station where she’s holed up for the night ran parallel to the building her trench coat laden trailblazers had settled into. From there she could monitor their only entryway and exit, so as not to miss their leave the next morning.

 

She leaves her post at the windowsill when the sun sinks below the horizon. They wouldn't be moving anytime soon.

 

Her experience in the bathroom leaves her too wired to even think about trying to sleep. She opts to do the easier thing instead, taking her backpack and stolen pip boy to go scavenging.

 

 

Down in the base of the station Grey finds all number of preserved oddities to entertain her for the night. Stacks of smooth manila folders send her into a joyful romp about, as she collects them to draw on later. There is nothing in this world that will ever compare to sliding a ballpoint over the surface of one of those. Except maybe the outside of a banana peel.

 

Grey has to stifle an actual sob when she finds a large stash of unsharpened pencils. She reaches into a metal drawer and pulls out an unopened bulk office supply box of cheap ballpoint pens. After opening it up she scrambles to retrieve some used printing paper. Nothing comes out in the first minute of scribbling, anything to try to get it to work. She lifts her hood and exhales on the nib for a second, scribbles on the paper, exhales again. And in some miracle of ballpoint CPR, a dark line of success appears.

 

Grey weeps openly, fogging up the inside of her mask. She tries the same trick on the second pen she pulls out, then the third, continuing till she knows they all work. At some point she has to take her hood off to mop up the tears. It’s the first time she’s cried since the world ended.

 

The office supplies weigh four or five pounds in total. She’ll ration them, waiting until she’s either bored or inspired to use them. Until then she had terminals to futz around with and office doors to break into.

 

Whoever designed the locks on this door had apparently created them to withstand the test of time and nuclear devastation. But not the crushing power of curiosity and an extremely determined piece of rebar. The door pops as the lock cracks under the pressure of a hearty swing.

 

The room is simple, a desk and a chair in the center. A magazine with giant gaudy letters reading ‘Guns and Bullets’ catches her attention for a bit, before she pockets it and moves to the terminal. The terminal is much more exciting, text files flit across the screen, musings of a man, the police chief, complaining about two ‘loose cannons’. When the monitor shuts off, she motions through the file cabinets, one has a folder with a key in it, which she pockets for later.

 

The key seems to serve as a catch all for the cell doors that she stumbles upon down the hallway. She opens each one of them and roots through each thoroughly. The last contains a compact boxlike object with several dials and switches, a large projectile weapon, and a small holotape the color of a tangerine. Grey picks it up off the shelf, brushing her thumb over the dusty cover to reveal faded script written with marker. The penmanship is soft, reading “We are done.”

 

Grey digs the pip-boy out of her bag without really thinking about it, and secures the tape inside.

 

“Detective Valentine.” It begins, formally.

 

“Nick.” The voice corrects.

 

The message itself is mournful. But the messenger disguises his fear of the forces that be as concern for the wronged. Grey hadn’t lived long enough in Boston to know what was going on in the limelight of the city. It had made sense that she didn’t recognize any of the names mentioned here. She had no context for this. But it goes in her bag anyway as she exits.

 

The night has progressed into something deeper, if she were to leave the safety of these walls, she’d surely die within hours. Bleed out on the streets, or be dismembered, or eaten. Maybe not in that order. So she sticks to the hallways, dark as they may be.

 

She turns another corner and her boots hit something that clinks, metal. Realizes what it is too late. Med-x needles litter the edges of the corridor, collecting along the rotting walls.

  
Shuffling behind her. A swift movement knocks her down. Pain blooms down the sensors of her neck. Then a numbing haze she’s come to know much too well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyway the mysterious figures will appear next chapter along with a not so friendly friendly. 
> 
> Also I've drawn an image of what Grey actually kinda looks like, anyone wanna see it? I'm thinking of posting this next chapter. Just as a visual ref.


	5. Stabby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> im feelin stabby

The muscles in Grey’s upper body don’t seem to be cooperating. Her head rolls from side to side, flopping around like a nearly dead fish on a dock. A pleasant numbness radiates from a point on her neck, warming her body with euphoria as she comes to.

“Med-x has worn off already? Jesus, this one’s got a high tolerance.” A voice from somewhere far off in the distance. Grey doesn’t register any of it consciously.

Low vibrations crawl up out of her throat. A groan.

“Oh shut the fuck up! The sooner Sparta’s done with you the better, the dogs are getting hungry.”

Dogs! She loves dogs. Giggles erupt from Grey’s lax body as she thinks about the long line of family pets she’d taken care of. The last one, a Saint Bernard named Mammoth, had droopy brown eyes and always curled up in her bed on cold winter nights. She could almost feel the sensation of his long fur through her fingers, and the cold wet press of his nose when he woke her up in the mornings, hungry for breakfast. God, how she had loved him.

She groans again, mourning the death of a good dog.

“I told you to shut up!”

She tries to glare at him for interrupting her anguish, but is unable to lift her head all the way. It sways limply in his direction. Not threatening much but the stillness of the air.

Grey feels the dull thumping of footsteps grow closer over the carpeted wooden floorboards. Then a sweeping movement, the fabric of her hood being pulled off.

 

The sensation is cutting, slightly muffled sounds becoming unnaturally clear without the cloth barrier. Buzzing joins the noise of the background, electrical? Breathing from undefinable points, a spike in the man’s heartbeat in front of her. If she concentrates, she can hear the chambers seize and release, ba dum, ba dum, ba dum. Grey looks up at him.

The man has fashioned himself some sort of armor. Copper toned pipes sprout up from the metal adorning his chest, criss crossing into his line of vision. Grey can’t see any practicality in its design or function, and she almost laughs at his appearance until he opens his mouth.

“What is it?” The man asks, horrified.

It?

Grey feels cold.

“Looks like one of them institute synths, but they gave up finishing it halfway.” A feminine voice laughs.

Did they mean her?

“Yeah but it’s still got fleshy bits! So what in the hell…?” He flounders, gesturing crudely at her face.

Her face.

They can see her face.

Bad. Bad. Bad.

She tries to grab her hood back from the man, but finds her hands bound behind the chair they’ve tied her to.

“This is freaky, you honestly think it could be-?”

The woman draws a knife. Both Grey and the man jump. She grins impishly, pointing the blade vaguely in Grey’s direction. Her eyes are too dark to distinguish iris from pupil, black paint deepens the sockets, turns her face into a skull.

“Lets find out.” The woman, Dark-eyes, says. The knife comes uncomfortably close to Grey’s nose. She can see speckles of rust dot the surface.

“Wait, wait, wait, don’t fuck its face up.” The man intervenes, spreading an arm out in front of Grey to block Dark-eyes’ movement.

“Why not? Sparta’s gonna kill the kid anyway.” The knife is still a very prominent presence in the room. Much too close for Grey’s personal comfort.

“Maybe we could sell it to one of the slavers, someone’s gotta be into synths right?”

Oh that’s an ugly word. Slavers. Grey frowns.

“Nah. It’s not gonna happen.” Dark-eyes withdraws the knife and crosses her arms in a defensive motion. Grey thanks several different deities over the fact that the knife is no longer pointing at her, just to cover all her bases.

“Listen, hold on, I’m serious about this. We might be able to get… at least thousand caps outta this thing if we market it right.” His eyes dilate, his breathing becomes heavy, and his heartbeat even more irregular.

“Oh, fuck off.” Dark-eyes shifts, looking agitated.

“I’m gonna bring this up with Sparta, you watch, I’ll be rich. We’ll be rich.”

The man itches the junkie-scarred crook of his elbow. Some of the marks there are minutes old, red and angry, just starting to scab over. Whatever he’d injected while Grey was asleep was just starting to kick in.

“A thousand caps isn’t gonna be enough to keep up with your bad habits.” Dark-eyes says, motioning to the pile of needles in the corner with her head.

“I’m brilliant. We’re gonna be rich.” He continues, eyes glazed, unaffected by the jab. Steps echo as he walks into the next room over.

 

Dark-eyes observes, then glances over her shoulder. When the other raider’s footsteps patter off, she gets up and locks the door, hand lingering on the knob.

“We have however long it takes for him to come back down from his high. An hour at most. You’re going to shut up and listen to my every word.” She begins, her back still turned.

Grey says nothing. Dark-eyes faces her.

“This happens every time we catch one. Bozo always plans to sell them to the slavers, while Sparta just wants to carve chunks outta them. If I had my way we’d just ransom you, easy stuff, none of this hardcore torture business. But i’m not in charge.” Dark-eyes says the word torture with slight distain, and the word ransom like a completely normal thing. Like how one would refer to groceries or dirty dishes.

Grey says nothing, understands even less, blinks. The woman continues.

“I don’t care what you are kid. Synth or whatever. You synths ain’t never done anything to me that a human did ten times worse. And slavers? They’re the multiplier.”

Dark-eyes touches the skin on her neck, feels phantoms of choking steel and fear. Grey doesn’t understand this motion either.

“There’s a loophole here. Slavers won’t pay for damaged toys, not out here anyway. But if you can’t be sold you’ll be killed by boss. It’ll take days. Sparta is very creative with a knife. You picking up what I’m laying down?”

“Yeah.” Grey’s tongue feels heavy in her mouth, like cotton wound too tightly on a spool.

“So here’s your first choice. I’ll fuck up your face so you won’t be sold, but when Bozo realizes you’re ruined merchandise, he’ll pass you on over to the boss. Sparta will have her fun for a few days, and you’ll end up dead in this pit.”

“Your second option is for me to leave you be. Bozo will sell you, then he’ll run off with the money to buy a stash of psycho and overdose on a street corner in Goodneighbor. In the meanwhile you’ll be fitted with a bomb collar, auctioned off, then tied down in your owner's bed an-”

“Do it.” Grey cuts in.

Dark-eyes nods silently and takes out a different knife, opening the blade. No rust on this one. She holds it like a surgeon.

“Left side or right?”

 

 

Sparta leaves the room after four hours, the screaming stopped in the first. She grabs a crusty dark brown rag that had been a light beige prior to the war. Dark-Eyes watches, feeling a pang of remorse as Sparta wipes Grey’s blood off of her hands.

“Put its clothes back on, I don’t want to look at it anymore. Makes me want to vomit.” Sparta orders, angry nausea rolling off her voice in waves. She drops the rag on the floor and treads out.

Grey’s heavy coat and other miscellaneous articles sit wadded up in a pile outside the door. Dark-eyes gathers it up in one arm, and thumbs the full dose of med-x in her pocket. Apology drugs, stolen from bozo the other evening. Dark-eyes hadn’t planned the measure, but he’d left his chems out in the open like that.

Dark-eyes gets up and enters the torture room. It’s well lit by Sparta’s design, lights spotlighting the figure tied down in the wooden chair at the center of the room. The amount of power the space saps is obscenely decadent.

Grey sits in the the middle, smiling when Dark-eyes walks in. Blood dribbles from her busted lip as she tries to curl the corners upward, she makes it about halfway before giving up, grimacing.

“I don’t want to die here.” Grey breathes out with the last bit of oxogen left in her lungs. There’s distinctly less med-x induced slur in her vocal chords, but more swelling. She’s in too much pain to lie.

Most people gave up within the first few hours, Dark-eyes notes. And Grey was in no less sorry shape then most people Sparta had sunken her teeth into. She’d seen people that had come out of a fistfight with a yao guai looking better then Grey right then.

“Not yet.” Grey gasps.

Most of her ribs were broken.

“I- we could leave, together.”

Dark-eyes actually startles at this, at the unbidden optimism in Grey’s tone. Like the plan could actually work.

“Then what?” Dark-eyes scoffs. “Kid, there’s nothing out there. Not for me, and definitely not for you.”

Grey pauses while Dark-eyes unties her from the chair. She’s too weak to move around all that much, both understand she wouldn’t get far if she bolted. Dark-eyes hands back her thick jacket, and helps Grey shimmy back into it. The hood lays in between the raider’s palms.

“Listen, no, wait. Please. If I can- you can shoot, you know about this place. Right?”

“I can shoot.”

“If we take it slow then we could. We could make it.”

Dark-eyes looks at Grey, really looks at her. Sees hope. Then cannot look for any longer.

‘Mercy.’ She thinks, but is not sure for who. Reaches into her pocket.

Dark-eyes stabs the med-x into the seam of her neck, right where the artery on a normal human was.

Grey drifts back into the horror of nothingness.

Et tu?

 

She dreams of the vault.

_“So why silver?” Grey asked the man, reminding herself that she still didn’t know his name. She’d ask later._

_“...Why?”_

_“I mean, like, I don’t think you have a vendetta against the color, but you reacted pretty strongly when I said you’d look good in a brown suit.”_

_She recalled the way he’d shifted around, embarrassed at his own defensiveness._

_“No, no, brown is fine. Silver is just, cool.” There was a little sparkle in his eyes as he’d spoken the last sentence. Admiration._

_“Sometimes- technically grays can be warm or cool or even completely neutral. Er, wait. You mean like, cool-suave-cool right?”_

_“Yeah, It’s... mysterious. I don’t see myself as a cool guy, but silver makes me feel confident.”_

_“I gotcha. Lipstick makes me feel the same way, a little bit dangerous. Hey maybe we could do both! Red lipstick and matching silver suits with fedoras. Bet that would turn a few heads huh?”_


	6. BANG

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, jesus christ.

Gunshots.

 

Shouting.

 

Silence. A pleasant numb. 

 

Footsteps, closer. More hesitant than the raiders. Fewer.

 

Voices.

 

Delicate tapping against the locked door.

 

A click of success.

 

A flash of energy pushes into the room, checking each corner. She turns to face Grey. 

 

Her outfit is all sleek silver, almost looks new, from the top of her hat to the bottom of her jacket. Her painted lips bright red like a warning.

 

Grey thinks she’s hallucinating. Then thanks her brain for coming up with a really pretty lady to look at while she dies. Decides it might not be the worst way to go.

 

Except, wait, Grey recognizes that trench coat. And that bat. And that rifle.

 

Her saviors. The pair she’d been following. 

 

Grey decides that this woman looks much more dangerous up close then through the scope of her gun. 

 

Then the second person follows.

 

A man strolls in behind her, eyes glowing briefly before he steps into the light. His trench coat is littered with patches, and when he tips his hat the worn texture of it goes fuzzy under the office lighting. And then she sees the hole in his skin.

 

Gray, like hers.

 

She says nothing, and is very briefly afraid.

 

It covers his entire face, she sees no human skin. There’s a gaping hole in the left side of his jaw descending down into the collar of his dress shirt. She can see little bits of metal skeleton, strange multicolored wires. Faint whirring resounds from the gash in his neck as he shifts his head to face Grey at the center of the room. 

 

 

_Prototypes of this body hang, incomplete, on the walls all over the lab. On display like bugs pinned in a glass case, an arm here, a leg there. Tricolor wires connect sensors embedded in the flesh of a beating heart to the processors telling it to keep working. Bastardizations of the human body, perfected, then undone._

 

_“It’s only temporary, placeholders while everything is in the works.”_

 

_The overseer finishes attaching the stretch of synthetic skin over the internal metal framework of Grey’s right hand. He pats the appendage gleefully, then moves over to an open panel on the side of her neck to restore connection to Grey’s spine._

 

_When Grey can feel again, she sits up, swinging plastic legs off the side of the surgery table. She looks down at the new limbs the man has attached. The hands that are not hers, not hers, not hers. The overseer walks around the table, kneeling in front of her, looking over the doll-like body._

 

_He takes the hand that is not hers, and kisses its cold knuckles. This is wrong. She has no stomach to vomit out of._

 

 

 

“They’re alive.” The man airs on the side of caution, placing a hand over what Grey assumed was a pistol, but not drawing. 

 

“Unconscious?” 

 

Grey leans forward in her chair, trying to get a better look at the man, trying to discern the whys and hows without context. A futile effort.

 

The woman starts at Grey’s stirring, her weapon trained on Grey in one fluid motion.

 

Oh no. That’s not what she wanted. Too much animosity, too many guns pointed in her direction. She’s had enough of that, knife wounds were nothing compared with being full of holes. Swiss cheese. 

 

She’s still hazy from the drugs, not quite thinking as sharply as she needs to be, admiring the Aphrodite like beauty of the woman pointing the gun at her head. How would one put this lovely lady at ease? 

 

“So, uh. Did you fall out of the sky? Er- heaven? uh. How do’sis line go again?” The words seem to fall from her mouth.

 

Silence from all parties.

 

“You’re no raider.” The woman lowers her weapon. 

 

“Those guys? No no no, they trapped me in here. can I have some help, my hands are…”

 

The man’s face grows soft, empathetic.

 

“You’re not gonna stick me if I help you out here right?” The woman jokes, turning the safety on. 

 

“Nope! You guys are cool, prolly kill me if I moved funny toward you.” 

 

The woman walks behind her to release her. Grey hears the sweeping noise of a knife being unsheathed and panics, jumping in her chair. 

 

“Hey, you’re safe, I’m just cutting the rope away.”

 

“Yeah.” the sound gets stuck at the back of her throat.

 

She feels the rope loosen and break away under the blade, it doesn’t touch the fabric of her gloves, but cuts all the way through her bindings. Grey’s hands tremble as the rope falls to the floor.

 

“Where are you from, friend?” The man’s voice warms Grey’s entire body, she can’t quite place the city accent under his words. 

 

“Not here.” Lies of omission never really felt like lies to Grey, they came naturally. There’s still an overlaying sense of danger that has settled deep into her bones, there’s something she needs to know, “Big face paint lady, the leader, she’s gone?”

 

The man’s eyes _glow_. She has to look away.

 

“You’re safe.” The man reassures. 

 

Grey brings her hands up to her face, the fabric of her hood obscuring the purple and red mottled skin underneath. The med-x still numbs most of it, but she can feel her left eye swollen underneath the cloth.

 

“I don’t have anywhere t’ go.” Grey admits as she presses her thumb softly to her injury, it’d be quite the shiner soon enough. It throbs underneath the pressure, the push of blood grounding against the plastic lifelessness of the hand under her leather glove. 

 

The woman stands, extending a hand for Grey to take. She is unfortunately wobbly on her legs, nearly face-planting into the ground, but the woman holds her steady. 

 

“This is Nick, and I’m Nora. We were headed back to Diamond City, just west of here. You can come with us, if you’d like… uh?” 

 

“Oh! Grey. I’m Grey. Following you guys sounds good.”

 

“Did you have anything with you when this lot captured you?”

 

“A bag, I know where it is.”

 

“Alright, Nick and I will head out front and guard the building while you grab your things.” 

 

 

Grey heads deeper into the building to retrieve her bag, the space is quieter now than when she had arrived. Her captors had left her things in the file room at the base of the station.

 

She uses her peripherals to navigate over the corpses scattered on the ground, giving a wide berth to what had used to be someone's head, lying in fragments of bone and squished pieces of cortex. Grey tries not to think about how she’d done the same thing to the victims trampled by panicked crowds the day the bombs fell. And it's not all the same. She doesn't accidentally step in anyone's bits and pieces this time around. It doesn't affect her.

 

Paper shifts beneath Grey's feet. It tears a bit beneath her weight as she sinks slightly into the office carpet.

 

A wet gurgling noise. 

 

Someone trying to breathe in.

 

“Kid. I know that's you. Come here.” 

 

Wrenching. Another gasp. 

 

She locates the source of the speech, behind a desk turned makeshift barrier. Dark-eyes leans up against the desk, weakly covering one of the inky red holes scattered across her lungs, bubbling in between her fingers as she breathes in and out. 

 

“Shoot me.” The raider’s hands tremble as she flops onto the ground, desperately grasping at Grey's boots.

 

Grey kneels, taking the raider’s shoulders and righting her back up against the desk.

 

“It’s gonna, you’re-” 

 

“No.” Dark-eyes gasps.

 

She shakily transfers her pistol to Grey. Dark-eyes positions Grey’s right hand over the trigger, resting the barrel of the gun against her own forehead. 

 

“Time to return the fucking favor. I stopped your hurt, now you stop mine, not negotiating here kid.” 

 

“I didn’t want the med-x.” 

 

“You needed it.” 

 

Grey can feel the vestiges of the drug still swirling in her system, the out of place euphoria coating her thoughts like sugar. It begins to grow thin, sloughing off her rose tinted goggles, revealing the actuality of Dark-eye’s wounds. 

 

Grey remembers reading somewhere about the amount of blood a person could loose before they were essentially dead. Dark-eyes wasn’t there yet, but the holes in her lungs wouldn’t seal before she reached that point. She would suffer.

 

Grey feels the weight of the gun. Safety’s off. 

 

She aims. Dark-eyes grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow sorry this took so long to post number I, number II Finally Canon Characters!
> 
> Also here's my fic tumblr. 
> 
> http://halfhp.tumblr.com/


	7. A vague ringing sensation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nora and Nick deliberate unsuccessfully. Followed by sad detective. Followed by more unsuccessful deliberation. (And a little suspicion.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm gonna go over this when i wake up, its too late to do anything rn so if there are any glaring mistakes leave a comment and like yell at my ass to fix it. i'll be back in a few hours.

 

They wait outside in ruins of the precinct while Grey retrieves her things. 

 

Nora holds herself like a marble column. Her tall stature is uncommon anywhere in the wastes, where malnutrition causes stunted growth among the population; even in large settlements like Diamond City food can become scarce. Her dark skin is relatively unmarred, save for spots of old acne scars dotting along her forehead. Across her cheekbones she sports a light smattering of freckles like tiny raindrops on a window. 

 

“This whole thing, it puts me off.” She takes a long drag from the cigarette Nick had let her steal from his packet. The smoke dissipates into the cold afternoon. “But I genuinely think she has no clue what she’s doing.” 

 

Every rational bone in her body rattles in conflict. Their mysterious follower, Grey, Nora now presumed, had taken rudimentary steps to hide. Neither of them could spot her in the daytime. But during the evenings when visibility was low, Grey had to get closer to track their movements. If Nora turned around fast enough, she’d be able to get a glimpse of movement as Grey darted behind a building to hide. The gleam of circular goggles.

 

Both had suspected a spy of some sort. In the past there had been no shortage of hired mercenaries that tried to take them down for a few easy caps. Though, apparently the caps stopped being good enough, or maybe they had just thrown in the towel, or been too much a pain in the ass to kill, because they hadn’t had any encounters within the last few months. Grey hadn’t followed the pattern of any mercenary though, she’d never approached them while they had been any sort of vulnerable. She left them alone after they recovered from a fight, or when Nora slept. 

 

And then she’d disappeared. Poofed. Nora thought that had been the end of it. 

 

But it’s funny how fate works sometimes.

 

 

They’d stopped for the night in a diner. A waning half moon lighting their surroundings, Valentine’s optics piercing through the darkness leftover. Nora sat on the floor, cracking open a can of room temperature cram. Valentine turned away from the window, furrow in his brow disappearing when Nora waved him over to join her. 

 

They sling bad pre-war jokes back and fourth, eventually dissolving into lighthearted conversation as the moon rose higher in the sky. A comfortable quiet descended as Nora picked the last bit of food out of the tin with her fingers, while the pensive look from the window worked its way back on to Valentine’s features. 

 

Nora knew not to push here.

 

Eventually he returned from his thoughts, asking her if she’d like to help him with a case from the old Nick. She accepted with a tempered eagerness, asking him to tell his story.

 

He begins it with a once upon a time.

 

She gets an abridged version. Simple to a point. Eddie Winter, villain, plays the god of Boston. Succeeds. Sees the end coming and locks himself up. Becomes immortal by deliberately irradiating his skin off. 

 

Valentine grimly tells her his plan, to kill Winter before he could begin his evil reign all over again. 

 

But there was more to it then that, more then this tailored version she’d been given. Something Valentine gave away in the subdued rage of his voice. 

 

So she pushed. 

 

He stopped breathing, looked down at his shoes. Started to talk about a girl. His girl. Nora had never seen the lines between the old and new Nick drift together like this, burred, almost converging. 

 

Nora _shoved_.

 

“What was her name?” 

 

Nick felt the full force of the question in his chest, a phantom sensation of physical grief he didn’t have the biology for.

 

“Jenny.” 

 

That had been enough. She offered her olive branch. 

 

“Alright, Detective.”

 

He took it, going on to describe the holotapes, Winter’s Achilles. The code that would undo the man. 

 

She asked when they could start. If there were any stations nearby to look for the tapes. He thinks about it for a moment, then mentioned a regional office on their path back to Diamond City they could check by. 

 

They’d dispatched the raiders fast enough, cleared each room on the first floor, then headed for the basement. Nick headed over to the desks to find what he could, while Nora got caught up on a locked door to a side room. He finished quickly, finding a tape labeled with a zero and a terminal with two more locations. 

 

The click from the lock echoed in its metal frame for a split second before Nora pushed the door open, the buzzing noise of electricity crawling out of its open frame as she slinked in, weapon raised. He followed after, entering the room as she checked the corners. Although the corners weren’t what had caught his attention. 

 

Heat from the stage lights pointed at the figure in the center of the room. Nick felt his coolant pumps begin to pulse rapidly as they tried to calm his internals under the sweltering temperature. 

 

Their hands looked like they were bound behind the chair, and judging by the slouch, they were either drugged or dead. Nick eyed the large drying puddles of dark red on the floor. Unconscious from blood loss? Pain? 

 

His auditory sensors picked up a hitch in the figure’s breath. The goggles of their hood staring blankly, unmoving.

 

“They’re alive.” He set a hand over the pistol snug in his coat. Cautious. 

 

Then everything broke to pieces. They leaned forward towards Nick, more like flopped maybe, then looked over at Nora. 

 

The first words that came from her mouth, in a drugged slurry, were a pick-up line. Or the butchered fragments of one. If Nick’s sensors weren’t turned up so high he would have missed the sound of Nora stifling her giggles, the only thing giving them away was the motion of her silver jacket as the silent laughter shook her shoulders. 

 

The next few minutes were surreal. Grey speaking with a certain familiarity towards them that set off alarms, but avoiding questions about herself. That had been the moment for Nora when everything fell into place. She was the same size as the phantom trailing them, and had been missing for about the same time Grey had been trapped here.

 

This should have made things easy for Nora, another piece of the puzzle secure. 

 

It made too much sense.

 

And yet, it made no sense at all. Grey was no raider. Or gunner. Even settlers didn’t brave going into this part of the city.

 

Nick puts the last of his cigarette out on the worn outdoor ashtray, taking care to make sure that the butt makes it into a nearby garbage can. 

 

“Caravaneer?” Nora asks. They’d been trading ideas, trying to identify who Grey could be.

 

“Fits the bill, could’ve been an extra arm. You don’t need any particular wasteland know-how in order to shoot straight.”

 

Nora sighs, not entirely convinced with this conclusion.

 

“Hey, chin up. We’ll get some answers. You seem to have a talent for that already.” Nick smiles.

 

“I just know which buttons to push.” 

 

  
A gunshot echoes from inside.  
  
Nora crouches down, slipping into the building with Nick on her tail.  
  
Heavy footsteps come thumping up from the basement. They watch, waiting for the worst. A stray raider they’d failed to take care of?

 

Nora calms as Grey scuttles up the stairs with a giant bag strapped to her back and a new pistol in her hands. She’s stiff as a board when she reaches the top, looking over her shoulder. She takes one arm and folds it over her ribs protectively, shoulders heaving.

 

She just about leaps out of her skin when Nora clears her throat.

 

“You alright there?” Nick asks.  


“Yeah, I, uh. It dropped funny.” Grey swings the gun like a pendulum, keeping it pointed at the ground. She doesn’t look at it. “I’m good, we can go now.” She begins to walk to the exit, when she passes by Nick notices the tremor in her hands. 

 

He doesn’t believe it for a second, and glancing back down to the basement, he wonders what really happened. Before Nick can ask, Nora motions him to follow her out. They’ll talk later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has pictures of Grey.
> 
> http://halfhp.tumblr.com
> 
> And like little snippets i'll never touch again prob lmao


	8. Drawn dicks, while high, never worn.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter that literally no one asked for BUT out of the good and kindness of my heart, yeah I got nothing. Have fun reading bad diary entries LMAO. 
> 
> Edit** August 11, 2017  
> Added extra misc stuff. Sorry I've been gone so long! Next chapter should be up eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regular text is writing  
> Italics is something happening outside the writing

 

_This room is dark, electricity humming around the city at a safe distance away from her. Papers shuffle downstairs, the occasional sound of a coffee mug clanging against a metal surface. Grey, still fully dressed, lays passed out on an extra bed in Valentine’s detective agency. Her hand stretches uncomfortably over the nightstand on her right, under which, a square notepad rests. She’s still gripping a ballpoint pen, which is slowly slipping from her fingers._

 

_Around four hours ago, she recorded the following. The cursive writing is nearly illegible._

 

Captain’s log: fuck in Fenway

 

Mm no i can do this tomorrow. Med ex can suck my BIG- _(There are no other words on the page. After the dash, a poorly rendered cartoonish illustration of Grey sits on the page. Four fingers hold an oversized pen at crotch level, as she thrusts her hips forward, a spout of ink flies from the tip of the pen.)_

 

 

Day 1 addendum + Day 2 in Fenway

 

We arrived here early this morning (?) I’m still not sure about the exact time. Exhaustion and the lingering effects of med-x will do a number on one’s personality, I don’t actually remember writing the above entry. 

 

Originally I was planning on saving this notebook for sketching purposes, but having an archive of things might do me some good. Love a good impulsive decision sometimes. 

 

So- day two in the shadows of the big green monster. It’s a little dilapidated but now I can see why it was so scary for batters. It’s the same reason these people can survive here, build a life for themselves. I have no right to be, but I feel proud.

 

For now I’ll be holed up in Detective Valentine’s building. Locals call it the agency. It’ll be a temporary thing for now, the shorter the better. Valentine is more observant then I’d like. He hasn’t confronted me, but there’s a clear difference in the way he looks at me and Nora. She’s a friend, I’m a conundrum that may or may not be dangerous. Spoiler alert buddy- I’m really not. Unless he thinks the arm strength required to do a maximum of three push ups is intimidating. Maybe if i chew on ice cubes near him? Leave the cap off of a tube of toothpaste? God I really should learn how to use a gun.

 

Holy shit im gonna get kicked out

 

_The second time Valentine picks up the sounds of scratchy handwriting from the other room, he makes a mental note. Literate. A zipper catches once, twice, papers shuffle, then the bag is zipped shut once again. He hears mattress springs creak, waits a good thirty minutes, then opens her case file back up. The one he started last night. He mulls over his observations, but comes to no decisive conclusion. He could only infer that she wasn't from here. Caravaneer hits closest, that or just someone with stereotypically Irish luck._

 

 _His second thought is vault dweller, but this idea is a little trickier. No vault suit or pip boy that he’s seen so far, but there’s an unfamiliarity in her body language that reads from hundreds of miles away._  
  
Hmm.

 

_Earth shattering revelations seemed to be illusive tonight._

 

_He holds the file delicately, open in his barren hand. At the only information she’s divulged. In dark red ink it reads;_

 

_Name: Grey_

 

 

Day 3 in  ~~ Fenway ~~ Diamond City

 

It’s beginning to cool down, to the point where you can see your breath. Maybe we’re later in the year then I thought.

 

This is a strange little ‘city’. They’ve repurposed the most important baseball stadium in history, turned it into a place to live. I know the med-x doesn’t make me hallucinate anymore, but when we came around the block and saw the guard in an old catcher uniform, I thought I was seeing things. One of these days I need to just walk, record all that I can.

 

Heard Nora talking to detective glowstick last night, a while after i’d gone to bed. Something about me being with the caravans (merchants with the two headed cows?) 

 

Gonna see if I can get some gossip out of the traders. Don’t know how far they travel, or even if they’re brave enough to leave the city boundaries, but I wanna get some info on outlying areas. Find out how much of the world survived. 

 

I remember vaguely telling the detective I wasn’t from around here. They’ve attributed that to the fact that I was really out of it during the trip over here. But that’s gonna come back to bite me in the ass one of these days. I figure I’ll run with the (quasi)lie as much as possible though. Just gotta avoid them till I find my cover.

 

 

No one’s gonna know. No one needs to now. 

 

 

November 6, 2288 Diamond City

 

I heard the date in the market tonight, some drunk asked the handy hovering at the storefront what time it was. It told the time down to the second. Don't remember anything after it said the year. Halloween was seven days ago, my birthday.

 

I spent my 211th birthday in that chair at the police office. My ribs are healing where Sparta broke them, still hurts to breathe.

 

And in the vault, I knew this was coming. don’t know if that makes me feel any better. Only was lucid for a fraction of the time- but it still. You could tell something was wrong. He stopped all the clocks some time during the first year. Even the pip boy I stole, he disabled his own chronometer.

 

And I could have tinkered with it. I could have gotten it working, I would have done that before. 

 

Two hundred and eleven. Huh.

 

Wonder if it’s still possible to get completely wasted, I have some catching up to do.

 

_Grey closes the notebook, the air in the room is unmoving. Her breath creating ripples in the stillness._

  
_She walks through the door of the agency, hunched over, whistling happy birthday into the open November air._

 

 

November 7, 2288 Diamond City

 

Never found that alcohol, but I did find Los Angeles. 

 

Thank god for Los Angeles. 

 

It took some poking around, but eventually I caught one of the long distance caravans right as they were about to head out west, towards a city called Boneyard. I asked them where exactly that was, and they took out a _handmade map_. 

 

The thing spanned from coast to coast, small settlements dotting the east, Diamond City’s marked with a star. Turns out the District of Colombia still exists (relatively speaking- I mean it wasn’t completely vaporized), and Vegas (of all the places) Don’t see much in the midwest. But the west, every spot on the map is a small town, and California is littered with them. Lots of stars too, major cities with decently sized populations. 

 

Back to my birthplace, I thought it had been lost to the bombs. But no, Los Angeles _is_ Boneyard. Some crafty son of a bitch survived. Multiple crafty sons of bitches, even. Made a home for themselves on the outskirts, Orange County and the like. 

 

I don’t know much about living here in the wastes, but I’ve been to most of the towns along the caravan’s western route (Albeit 200 years ago) All I need to do is learn my contemporary history and cultivate some opinions. if I can spin the detective’s suspicions into a cover, I can make a new life for myself. 

 

He’s dead. 

 

 

November 7, 2288 Diamond City

 

Winter snaps it’s fingers, and snow blurs the corners of the world.  
green edges of the wall fading into white,   
Icicle teeth on the stadium lights high above bite and break, 

you go back.

To when the world was enriched with power,  
families in their bright red new cars, hiding the wounds torn across the earth, 

gouged in deep;

To your last summer rain in Beijing.  
Where you stopped for a while with your bent umbrella,  
Watching your reflection on Shuizhui dissipate with the droplets.  
Unknowing that moments before, not even a five minutes’s walk away

The decision was made. 

One that rippled slowly across the world, and your heart. 

Cascading, destroying.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stimpack levels: 5% remaining
> 
>  
> 
> Damage evaluation: CRITICAL internal bleeding detected
> 
>  
> 
> Approximate repair time: 2 weeks
> 
>  
> 
> Launching repair sequence.


	9. Fake Poe

Nick shuffles his feet on the mat outside the office, stomping a little bit to get the leftover snow off his shoes. Winter is hard on the people here. A single harvest near the end of the year can mean the difference between barely scraping by and starvation on the outskirt settlements. Diamond City doesn’t have as much of a starvation problem, but a bad season means some go hungry.

He, on the other hand, thrives in this weather. The dry air and low temperatures allow him to work at full efficiency without any danger of overheating. His coolant pumps pulse at the same rate a hibernating animal’s heart would; fourteenth heartbeat marking the end of the minute as he steps into the room. Another function distancing him from the human populace of his city. 

Grey stands in front of a bookshelf, masked as the day she entered. Her nose is buried in an anthology of Edgar Allen Poe’s writings, marked with small black ink letters in the lower center of the first page spelling out _first edition_. The section is annotated to the nth degree in Nick’s clean handwriting, pushing along the boundaries of the paper’s edge. Unbeknownst to both of them, inside the newer parts of her skull, a chronometer ticks in synch with his. Seven thirty P.M. on the dot. 

She’s humming a tune Nick can’t place, tapping her foot. He figures he should announce himself.

 

“I had to bribe someone to buy those from Myrna, never did figure out how she ended up with this particular set.”

 

Grey flounders a little bit, nearly dropping the book. She recovers quickly.

 

“I wouldn’t sell them to you either. What kind of monster annotates a first edition?” Grey jokes, pretending like she isn't utterly rapt by his commentary within the margins.

 

“Ah, c’mon an old synth’s allowed to be selfish every once and a while.” A sly pause, “Also it’s a fake.”

 

“What?” 

 

“Don’t know your background on the pre-war black book market,”

 

Grey shuffles her feet, trying to draw on knowledge from her fictional caravaner background.

 

“A little bit. First editions are big bucks if you find the right buyers. Well off people with time on their hands. Take that and multiply by an entire nation? I can connect the dots.” Perfect.

 

“Sounds like you’ve got the idea.” Nick holds out a hand, Grey gives him the book. He removes the dust jacket, displaying the front.

 

“Normally I’d advise against judging a book by its cover, but in this case…” He points to the front, holding it at an angle so that she can see clearly.

 

“See the title? Brown print, the original would’ve been a different font- navy blue with smaller text.”

 

This was too weird. 

 

In the bag on Grey’s back, the holotape she found in the regional office weighs like a judgment. The sorrowful voice from the recording plays again in her mind, _Nick…_ Same first name, last name, occupation, even his mannerisms screamed _old world._ Old world _cop_ at that. 

 

The same Nick Valentine?

 

Her head spins. There are too many missing variables, too many holes in this narrative. But she has a metaphorical shovel and a desperate need to keep digging, to know.

 

“Why the interest?” She faces him, voice slow, deliberate. Leaning forward at the slightest angle.

 

Nick looks at her with uncertainty. 

 

“Used to own the real deal, long time ago. They’re still going for a pretty penny though huh?”He avoids the question with a question. 

 

How old is he? A long time ago? How could something like him exist pre-war and not be all over the news?

 

“I’m no merchant, but that’s what they told me.” 

 

He holds out the book for her, making what he thinks is eye contact. Hard to tell. But she takes the forgery back from his outstretched hand, the one with skin. 

 

Grey’s internal line of inquiry fragments as she holds the fake close, runs over the title with her gloves on. She can’t feel the letter’s indents through the leather over her fingers. Can’t feel the little differences.

 

“What happened to them?” He segues into the important question of the evening. The irradiated equivalent to the elephant in the room. Grey turns to face the bookcase and sets the book back.

 

Time to spin her own stories. 

 

“We were… coming in blind. No map, or any prior knowledge of the area, really.”

 

“Your work doesn't usually take you through here?”

 

“No, normally we’re just Boneyard to Los Vegas, but… boss said there might be profit out this way.”

 

“Easy way for something to go wrong.”

 

Grey nods her head, playing the injured party.

 

“Before the main caravan hit the outskirts of Cambridge, I went to scout a safe path into the city. We agreed to meet back near a station around sunset.”

 

Nick remains silent. She continues to spin.

 

“There wasn’t much left of them when I got back. Just scraps really. Some blood. Didn't see any bodies but… I didn’t stick around for much longer after that.”

 

It’s an easy story. No evidence. The city doesn’t keep track of when or where the caravans come from either.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be. Didn’t know them that well anyway.”

 

…But a company trying to build a trade route from that far west? That’s never been done before. Sure stuff filters in from out that way, but it’s all facilitated by trade, no one makes a straight trek like that without it being big news. 

 

That’s it!

 

“Please excuse me Grey, I need to go take care of some business before the market closes. Enjoy Poe.”

 

“Get real, no one reads Poe to enjoy themselves. People only read Poe to briefly experience overwhelming existential dread through the disguise of romantic prose. And alcoholism. Maybe less the alcoholism though and more the pretty imagery. Good luck. It’s cold out there.” 

 

An unexpected chuckle escapes from Nick. It’s soft and deep. Stuck in the back of his throat with those guttural r’s that give away his Chicago accent. Grey watches as his eyes crinkle around the corners, and, oh! Laugh lines. Another mystery.

 

His coat sweeps the frame of the doorway as he passes through, closing it behind him. 

 

Grey can feel the brief rush of cold outside air through her mask before it disperses into the room. She turns off the light before heading upstairs. The Poe anthology sits on its shelf in the darkness, a fabrication from a bygone era. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been re-awakened by my writing passion pounding furiously at my door at one in the morning. No! You may not go to sleep, it yells. More Nick Valentine content! Now, Make it!
> 
> and what can i say to that, really?

**Author's Note:**

> Also here's my tumblr, has spoilers for the fic so make sure ur caught up before u click that. It has drawings of Grey and Nick.
> 
> http://halfhp.tumblr.com


End file.
